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The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake Review — A Stunning Return, But Not Quite Definitive

Nintendo's flagship Switch 2 release of 2026 is out, and it is magnificent — mostly. Our review of a remake that honours a legend while leaving a few questions unanswered.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake is out now on Nintendo Switch 2, priced at $59.99 digital and $69.99 physical — and the physical edition is a full cartridge, not a Game-Key Card, which matters more than it should in 2026. It is Nintendo's flagship Switch 2 release of the year, and the reception so far has been emphatic: a Metacritic score of 96 at launch listing, and a Nintendo Life review headlined “A Stunning Remake, But Not Quite Definitive”. That headline is, in our view, exactly right.

What the remake gets right

Start with the obvious: this is Ocarina of Time, the game that taught a generation what a 3D adventure could be, rebuilt with the care its reputation demands. Hyrule Field at dawn, the first steps into the Deku Tree, the Temple of Time — the remake understands that these are not just levels, they are memories, and it treats them with the reverence of a restoration rather than the swagger of a reboot. The music, the pacing, the shape of the world: all intact, all improved by the simple fact of being playable on modern hardware without apology.

The launch numbers tell their own story

The appetite was visible before launch. In the Famitsu Japan charts for the week of 26 October to 1 November, Switch 2 sold 68,733 units in Japan ahead of the game's release, with the Zelda Special Edition model cited as a driver of that bump, while Switch Sports Resort led the software chart. Players were not just buying a game; they were buying the hardware to play it on. That is the kind of launch only a handful of titles in a generation can produce, and it puts the remake's reception in context: this was never going to be judged as an ordinary release.

Where “not quite definitive” comes in

So why the qualification? Because a remake of a game this loved invites a harsher standard than a new game ever faces, and on that standard there are edges. Some of the remake's choices — the places it chose to modernise and the places it chose to preserve — will divide players who have strong feelings about the original, and that division is the honest price of remaking a legend. Nintendo Life's headline captures the tension precisely: stunning, and yet not the final word. In our view, the remake earns its praise, but the original's shadow is long, and no single version can satisfy every memory of it.

Who should buy it

If you have never played Ocarina of Time, this is now the way to play it — the most accessible, best-looking version of one of the medium's foundational games, on the hardware it was made for. If you played the original in 1998, expect the strange pleasure of a place you know by heart rendered in a fidelity your memory never had. And if you were waiting for the definitive edition before returning to Hyrule: this is very close, and very good, and the remaining caveats are the kind you will argue about happily rather than regret.

The sound of Hyrule

One thing the remake gets unambiguously right is the audio. Ocarina's score is among the most famous in gaming, and hearing it rendered with modern clarity — the ocarina itself, the dawn chorus of Hyrule Field, the low dread of the Shadow Temple — is worth the price of admission on its own. In our view, sound is where remakes most often fail and where this one most clearly succeeds: it trusts the original compositions and simply lets you hear them properly for the first time.

The verdict

We will not invent a score for this review, and we do not need one: the critical consensus is already clear from a Metacritic listing of 96 and Nintendo Life's measured praise. Our judgement is simpler. This is a beautiful, careful, occasionally cautious remake of a game that defined a genre — essential for newcomers, deeply pleasurable for veterans, and just short of the definitive edition its biggest fans were hoping for. That is not a failure. It is, if anything, a compliment to the original: some games are so good that even their best remake cannot quite contain them.

A stunning remake, then — and a reminder that the games we call timeless usually are, even when the remake is not quite the last word on them.

Sources

• Nintendo Life — November 2026

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